


Contrast

by narsus



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Anorexia, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-04
Updated: 2011-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-23 10:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narsus/pseuds/narsus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perceptions of malnutrition change drastically, depending on the viewer’s presumptions, and of course the uniform changes everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contrast

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Cabin Pressure belongs to John Finnemore and BBC Radio 4.

Malnutrition does plenty of damage to an individual and much of isn’t physical at all. The physical hunger pangs: the gut-wrenching stomach cramps, the constant low-grade headaches, the cold, are all, if not manageable, at least readily identifiable. Martin has long ago learned that while strong black coffee will make him start to feel nauseous after a while, it mattered less on an empty stomach if he is actually going to be sick. Increased sugar in said coffee helps him stay alert and warm. It’s probably also eating away at his stomach lining but that hardly matters. Health food indulgencies like granola bars are expensive but one can easily do as an entire meal, and three pounds forty-five for six meals isn’t a bad deal at all. Bread is useful too and can be frozen to keep for longer. Forty-nine pence for a single loaf, plus thirty-six for a cheap, tasteless, jar of jam that will, nonetheless, raise his blood sugar levels. Water helps as well, enough of it and he can pretend that he isn’t so hungry after all.

Actually being sick isn’t so bad either. He’s grown used to it after a while and has more or less formulated his own standard procedure to deal with the process. It’s worse when he had to stick his own fingers down his throat to deal with the horrible, solid feeling of blockage, but other than that it really could be much worse. The first and essential step is to get himself to a toilet and make sure he is bent low enough over it so that there isn’t any danger of either missing the bowl of ending up with anything leaping back out, due to velocity, and hitting him in the face. The latter part has taken practice but he can gauge it well enough by now. It also helps to push his hair back from his forehead so that it isn’t hanging in his face, since his skin will be overheated and there is still the danger of backsplash, which is harder to get out of his hair than off his face. It helps to kneel on the floor rather than crouch, and place a steadying hand on the side of the toilet bowl, rather than worry about bracing it against the seat. Afterwards, if he has the time, rinsing his mouth with water several times and then waiting a little before he brushes his teeth, prevents triggering more vomiting. Splashing his face with water is always part of the process, as well as inspecting his cheeks for burst capillaries, which are a good indication of how violently he’s been throwing up.

The physical aspects aren’t so bad really. He can deal with them readily enough. Unfortunately, it isn’t the physical side that has the most impact, not really. The way that he is treated for shopping at Lidl or Aldi, the way that people look at his old, worn clothes, is an entirely different dimension. The message is simple enough: you are poor, therefore you have less worth as a human being. The people he does removal jobs for smile at him politely but there is always a lingering dismissal there, as if he is a mere indentured labourer to the lord of a manor. The students are the worst for it really. Students with cheap, but new, furniture, and the arrogance that comes with knowing very little of the world, but having gained acceptance to any number of institutions that have been billed at their ticket to success. Of course they’d come down eventually, and Martin has always noted the way in which the arrogant fresher, that he’s moved a wardrobe for, has become a much politer, though harried, recent postgraduate, when he moves said wardrobe back, four years later. By that point a few of them even ask how he’s manage to start his own business and he see their hearts sink when he tells them that he’d just inherited the van. It isn’t the story that they want, isn’t a courageous tale of pulling himself up by his bootstraps, and it is most certainly of no use to them when they were just about to start the desperate scrabble for employment.

People presume a lot about him from the trappings. The old clothes, the old van. The nice, middle class, ladies always look down their noses at him a little, but in that commonplace way that they always look down their noses at everyone. They know their place and he knows his, and that makes things easier in the long-run. They are coolly polite, dismissive and generally tip him a few pounds here and there. They almost always have perms that have gone out of fashion at least a decade ago. Their husbands, if they are rather more on the portly side, eye him with barely disguised hostility while he lugs furniture about with ease. A few times though, the look has been one of appreciation rather than annoyance, and in those cases it has been the husbands who have tipped well. The chavs gathered outside the newsagents look at his face and smirk, but then they look at his clothes and lose interest. The warehouse workers, mostly still wearing their high-vis vests, sometimes chat to him in the queue at the supermarket. He doesn’t exactly fit but it’s close enough for them to complain about the state of British manufacturing and the loss of large contracts. Which at least means that, occasionally, when the removals business is slow and he isn’t flying for free, he can pick up the odd few hours work slinging boxes in a warehouse.

The odd part is that the mindless work, often just weighing boxes, attaching labels and moving them from one pallet to another, is almost something he could enjoy. It doesn’t require much thinking and, for the jobs he tends to be assigned to, it doesn’t require too much talking either. He’s usually left to his own devices in a corner, clambering from one stack of boxes to another, with no need to communicate with anybody else. Sometimes, the other workers talk to him and he’s polite enough, but mostly he’s earned a reputation for silence. He is a quiet lad, who works well and is polite when spoken to, which is enough. Nobody expects more of him and that in itself is a release of its own. Nobody expects him to be a caricature of what a commercial pilot ought to be, nobody expects the trappings of social ease or success. It’s easier to heft about boxes for a few hours than it is to fly a plane with Douglas’ voice in his ear. If Carolyn ever sacks him, he supposes, that if he doesn’t just kill himself, he’ll get a job in a warehouse, packing parts for the civil aerospace industry.

When he puts on his uniform, of course, everything changes. Suddenly, the thinness that he’s been teased about in a warehouse, becomes fashionable. People look at his uniform, they glance at the four, gold, stripes on his epaulettes, and see an airline captain before they see anything else. When he buys very little for lunch, from the range of overpriced airport options, the looks he receives are in equal portions knowing, envious or vaguely disapproving. He can’t afford much more and always keeps to his budget but that’s not what they see. A slim, reasonably muscular, reasonably tall, despite Douglas’ assertions to the contrary, pilot, must be in equal turns obsessed with his health, deliberately starving himself or so obsessed with the latest food fad that none of the airport options past muster. It must be a deliberate choice, even if it’s an unhealthy one. The loose fall of his trousers must be by design rather than accident. His defined features must be the product of a strict dieting regime. He’s just that little bit thinner than the average slim man, and therefore he must be putting a great deal of effort into looking that way. He must be vain enough to care.

The really damaging part is, of course, always socio-economic. A slim, attractive pilot is always treated well. Men and women glance at him appreciatively, some even let their gazes linger, slyly or overtly. He sees desire in some eyes, acknowledgement in others. Some of the watchers view him as an equal, some as a walking, talking aspiration. Some, of course, want to simply sleep with a fashionably slim, reasonably tall, airline captain. Those are the ones that are easiest to ignore. He’s used to the appreciative looks of businessmen, as much as he is to the wide eyes of children who watch in rapid fascination as he passes. He often smiles back at the children who stare up at him and wonders which of them might one day take up flying. He returns the occasional, more direct, look of appreciation from older men with a slight quirk of his lips, that, on a more confident man, might easily translate as a smirk. Positive attention is something that comes with the uniform, he tells himself, but of course it isn’t all positive.

Sometimes, more frequently than he would have guessed at, the looks he receives are envious and, on rarer occasions, disgusted. When he eats nothing but a small salad, leaving him with a mostly empty plate, when he declines a pastry to go with his coffee, when he turns a sandwich packet over to read the calorie content. Then he sees the narrowed eyes, notes the barely concealed sneers and muttered comments. He’s honestly waiting for the day that somebody tells him to eat some real food for a change or threatens to hold him down and force feed him a burger. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess what they’re all thinking, and he can easily reason out the chain of logic that has brought them to their conclusion. They see a successful, young, pilot, not a man who just about has the money to get by. Where he’s trapped by necessity, they see a definitive choice and judge him based upon it. It’s enough, sometimes, to make him long for the monotony of the warehouse. The other workers there tease him, not unkindly, and are generally decent chaps overall. After all, their teasing has always been mollified with a smile and a wink, or an offer to make the tea this time, or a spare set of hands to help him move a particularly awkward pile of boxes.

Oddly, when he’s in a reasonably good mood, he doesn’t mind the dark looks. He starts to enjoy them because the envy is so laughable. He isn’t making a deliberate choice about his weight but they obviously think that he is. Society tells them that he must be, that, as a successful professional, he must be conforming to the latest fashionable dictates. And the envious, disgusted, glances are only the beginning. The men and women whose glances acknowledge him as an equal are fashionably thin as well, deliberately choosing food that he can only just afford. They smile in recognition, perceive him as a member of the self same elite. It’s all ridiculous and yet he can’t help but enjoy the false fraternity of the situation. The way that people treat each other is always based on presumption and deference to the fashions of the time. Martin just so happens to fit into a certain, presumed stereotype. He’s not, and probably never well be, the sort of man who turns heads like Douglas, but its close enough, and it might well be the only recognition that he’ll ever receive.

In the end, it’s that reasoning that he applies when Carolyn finally offers to pay him, when he accepts, what’s more or less minimum wage. Six pounds and ten pence, two pence over minimum wage, per hour. It’s hardly anything and yet it’s a ludicrously high leap in his earnings. It’s enough to cover things like fresh meat or snack food, or just allow him to buy a reasonable amount to eat. He could eat as much as he ought to, could put on a little weight and not have to worry so much about the cold. He could lose the one advantage that he’s gained through misconception. Instead, he takes up smoking, and decides that that the rest of his earnings can be better put towards a new watch, if only his cigarettes weren’t costing him almost a hundred pounds a sleeve.

**Author's Note:**

> A Patek Philippe 5140P in platinum has been known to retail at around £76,000.  
> Treasurer Slims Black can cost up to £9 per pack.


End file.
